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Comment by zapstar | Hacker News Reader

HyperCard was ahead of its time, and I still don’t think we’ve seen a solution as approachable and flexible.

Aside from Bill Atkinson simply being a genius, a shining trait of HC is that it didn't try to do everything.

There was a successor to HC called SuperCard (which I used to create a printed circuit board drawing app). SC added all of the features "missing" from HC, such as a large variety of different window types. In the process, it became harder to use, for not very much gain. Having both HC and SC on my computer, I invariably reached for HC, even when it meant that my programs didn't look quite as snappy.

For me, HC was what made it tolerable to use a Mac. I did some pretty outrageous things with it, such as controlling a primitive custom machine tool. I did have to create some "code resources" in Pascal or C to access my hardware interfaces, but those codes were often on the order of a couple dozen lines, and rarely needed to be maintained.

Visual Basic made the same mistake. The more "professional" it became, the harder it was for the people who were actually interested in using it. I stuck with VB5 long after VB.NET came out.

That's an interesting point about not doing everything. Livecode is a more powerful, capable tool very much based on HC, and while it has a great power-to-complexity ratio, I don't think it's (made up numbers) 5x more powerful, but 8x more complex. https://livecode.com/

This reminded me of the comments i've read online from modders about the modding tools for Neverwinter Nights 1 vs those of Neverwinter Nights 2. Both are very moddable games but the NWN1 tools were actually designed as part of the product (for many the official campaign was just a demo for the tools) and were very simple to use - but also very limited (e.g. areas could only be made by placing prefabricated tiles - though you could make your own tiles with external tools and also add additional objects on top of them, most of the area work was placing tiles together). On the other hand NWN2 was more freeform, had better visuals and features, allowed arbitrary terrain sculpting, etc but that also made it much more complicated to use.

As a result NWN1 has a ton more modules (campaigns/mods) for it than NWN2 and many people who spent considerable time on NWN1 never moved to NWN2 due to the increased complexity. To this day i often find comments about how simple and easy the NWN1 tools were, but i don't remember ever reading anything like that for NWN2 :-P.

Flash seemed like an evolved form of HyperCard, and the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise. I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.

> the proprietary nature of both were ultimately their demise

Agree.

> I retain some hope that somebody will redo / updo this family of tools

Hard agree.

> on top of a cross-platform game engine like Unity.

Wait what? Wouldn't you want it to be implemented at the very least on something like Godot, which is open source?

Aside from that, I think we are in full agreement on this - though my dream would be something like this on uxn (because I love the concept of uxn, I don't know that it would actually be feasible to do so - I suspect it wouldn't.)

Sorry, Unity was the first that came to mind, I forgot it was closed. Good call.

Though, I should clarify... the missed opportunity with Flash is that there was no good reason for the .swf format to be closed. IIRC, there were a few attempts made at making non-Adobe Flash players, but they were always terrible because of the necessary overhead of reversing the format.

Even if the initial version was built on Unity, as long as the creations were saved to an open and well-documented file format, alternative players could be written which would be a boon to the ecosystem.

That seems reasonable.

Honestly, I think open formats and protocols are more important in general than open code -- which is of course why we see them less and less these days :( .

Uxn should be able to host something like Hypercard, the hypertalk language would probably look something like akin to Postscript.

Uxn's Noodle software is inching toward something like Macpaint. A software that ties it all together as a game making tool would in Uxn would be very nice indeed!

It's been a while since I checked in on Uxn, I should look again! Last time I checked there wasn't much in the way of docs, but it looks like there's more now - there goes a couple of evenings in the near future!

Edit: Looking at your username and then comment history, it looks as if you are possibly actually one or both of the 100 rabbits?

If so, thanks for being one of my personal inspirations to keep learning about both computing and sustainable lifestyle!

I am :) Thank you for saying so.

We've been trying to write some documentation as things are finally stabilizing. If you're interested in learning uxnasm to write something like hypercard, I'd love to help.

First things first: https://compudanzas.net/uxn_tutorial.html

Awesome!

I'd definitely be interested in that, I actually started the tutorial about an hour or two before seeing this comment.

I'm thinking I'll run through this tutorial and then try to implement a couple basic ideas I've had bouncing around, is there way I should contact you when I get there? I'll try to check back here for any updates, an email address is in my profile as well if that works for you.

I'll probably need to work with Hypercard itself more first as well - at this point I only know how it works in theory plus a couple minutes of demo video.

GTK3 with Glade was a really great (albeit considerably more complicated) tool to do more or less the same thing with modern design paradigms and more complicated, capable widgets. Unfortunately, the GTK devs seem to be moving away from simple UI design with GTK4, making it pretty undesirable for building anything other than complex, hulking apps.

I still have a plethora of weekend projects made with GTK2/3 sitting around on my drives. Little MPRIS controllers, simple icon viewers, petname generators, hashing applications... I've got half a mind to fork GTK3 into a simpler UI design tool if I had the time for it.

Others Macintosh gems:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ResEdit

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontographer

and later

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai%27s_Power_Tools

And: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundEdit

Way ahead.

The original "greatest game of all time" Myst was implemented in Hypercard at least for the initial Mac release.

Didn't know that, but not surprised. When I got to play with Hypercard in elementary school, I drew houses and paths and put buttons on the paths to navigate between the screens, with some text to tell a very simple story (wish I still had it, but it's long gone. I only vaguely remember what a couple of screens looked like).

If I had more time with it maybe I might have been able to turn it into a proper game. Not on the same level as Myst, though, of course.

Not as approachable, but similar to HC and you get much more functionality for the learning curve: https://livecode.com/

Look at the paper: Implementation of Label Metaphor Using Shared Interaction Object Architecture by Koshizuka and Sakamura.

Implementation of Label Metaphor Using Shared Interaction Object Architecture

https://sci-hub.st/10.1109/tron.1994.378614

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